Teresa Woodruff, a researcher responsible for pioneering work in the care of women who will become infertile due to cancer treatment

Here are their remarks:

Hip hop choreographer Rennie Harris: “Movement is the last manifestation of your reality. What you do is who you are. Not what you say … Take action. Define your reality.”

Climate change scientist James McCarthy: “Balancing on the boundary can be some of the most exciting territory of all … and from this emerges a wonderful gift: New understanding and appreciation of whole worlds of ideas that appear to stand apart, and this can be an extraordinary opportunity for creativity.”

Television journalist Jane Pauley: “How often we get hung up on what we can’t do. Think about what you can. And if you can’t think of anything, keep thinking.”

Elizabeth Strout ’77: “The best part of what waits for you is that liberating prize of life, those remarkable moments when we understand that we are not the most important person in the world. The man on the side of the road is. The person on the airplane suffering is.”

Cancer and fertility researcher Teresa Woodruff: “As Bates graduates, you are equipped to tackle the seemingly intractable problems of our day. We are all counting on you to become the thought leaders and doers of the 21st century.”

“I saw this headline,” renowned television journalist Jane Pauley told the 455 members of the Bates College class of 2010: ” ‘Inspiration is everywhere, but you have to be looking.’

“Congratulations, and may you find inspiration everywhere you look.”

Pauley was one of five honorary degree recipients at the College’s 144th commencement ceremony, which began at 10 a.m. May 30 on the historic Quad.

The other honorands were Rennie Harris, the choreographer who brought hip-hop to mainstream dance; James McCarthy, a scientist recognized internationally for helping to communicate the science of climate change; Elizabeth Strout, a 1977 Bates graduate who won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction last year for Olive Kitteridge; and Teresa Woodruff, a researcher responsible for groundbreaking research in caring for women who will become infertile due to cancer treatment.

Always uplifting, the ceremony this year had a conversational, convivial spirit, as presenters on stage passed laughs around, friends and families jostled for camera angles and cheered on their graduates, and the breeze shook loose maple seeds that came glittering down like confetti in the sun.

In her welcome, Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen looked back four years to the convocation ceremony that was her first address to this group of students. Joking that she “felt fairly confident that none of you remember what I said” on that occasion, she recalled her theme on that day in 2006: the value of the skills of listening and questioning.

“Four years later,” Hansen told the students, “you have not disappointed my expectation that at Bates you would develop into the incendiary listeners and tough questioners that the world needs.”

Harris, the Philadelphia choreographer, has proven to the world his conviction “that hip-hop can transcend boundaries of race, religion, gender and economic status,” Bates trustee Geri FitzGerald said in introducing him. “He has transformed not just the art of dance, but our very notion of what art is and where it comes from.”

In his remarks, Harris offered insights distilled from his decades in making dance. “Movement is the last manifestation of your reality,” he said. “What you do is who you are, not what you say.”

He also asked the students to remember that we are in this life “to understand love on many, many levels” — and that being so, “remember when you’re looking down at someone . . . make sure your hand is reached out to pull them up.”

Saying that a discussion of climate change would take him at least an hour instead of the five minutes allocated for each honorand’s talk, McCarthy instead borrowed a page from the script of the 1967 film The Graduate.

He cited the famous scene at a graduation party at which young Benjamin Braddock is offered a single word of advice: “plastics.” But the solitary word that the Harvard researcher held out to his Bates audience was, instead, “boundaries.”

He asked the Bates graduates to reflect on the boundaries they have sought out and crossed in their time here, discovering new interests and abilities, and a newly expanded sense of the human family. By pausing at the boundary between different worlds, he said, we can understand the commonalities between those worlds.

“This can be an extraordinary opportunity for creativity.”

Pauley, one of the best-known female broadcast journalists to emerge during the 1970s, exhorted her audience of exceptional achievers to always judge themselves fairly. She warned against the pitfall of comparing oneself unfavorably to others — a bad habit suffered by Pauley herself and, as she related, by writer Mark Twain.

Later, with a story about some advice that helped children’s book creator Maurice Sendak create the popular Where the Wild Things Are, Pauley asked her listeners to focus on their abilities, not shortcomings. “How often we get hung up on what we can’t do,” she told the seniors. “Think about what you can.”

Strout, who also wrote the best sellers Amy and Isabelle and Abide With Me, was introduced by college trustee David Foster, a Bates classmate, as the “most spectacular member of the class of 1977.”

Referencing the Bates tradition of plunging through a hole in the ice into the campus pond in the dead of winter, Strout called this occasion “a big-deal Puddle Jump day.” But her remarks in other ways, too, gave the alumni-to-be a bracing splash of rhetorical cold water.

She described, first, a doctor she knows who vows never to help with a medical emergency on a plane, lest the outcome be unpleasant. And second, a man taken ill on the roadside being looked after by numerous passers-by.

“The best part of what waits for you is that liberating prize of life, those remarkable moments when we understand that we are not the most important person in the world,” she said. “The man on the side of the road is. The person on the airplane suffering is.”

She concluded, “Look forward to that relief of not being the most important person in the world, and you really will be all right.”

Woodruff drew lessons for her audience from the transformational outcomes for women and families that have resulted from her research. “Create your opportunities” rather than passively responding to circumstances, she said. Remember the value of teamwork. And above all, maintain your optimism even in the face of seemingly intractable problems.

“You have a world of possibilities awaiting you.”

Of the 455 seniors that Bates graduated Sunday, 241 are women and 214 are men. Forty-nine graduates come from Maine, and 28 of the United States were represented in the class. Twenty-six of the graduating students come from other countries.

Psychology was the most common major among the class of 2010, with 55 graduates. Economics was a close second, with 54 majors, and politics was the third most popular, with 47. Twenty-nine women and 20 men took double majors. Two women and one man took three majors.

Sixty-seven members of the class of 2010 earned bachelor of science degrees, with the remaining 388 receiving bachelor of arts degrees.

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2010/05/30/commence-report2010/feed/0Bates announces Commencement 2010 honorands, speakershttp://www.bates.edu/news/2010/05/26/commencement-honorands-speakers/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2010/05/26/commencement-honorands-speakers/#respondWed, 26 May 2010 19:21:37 +0000http://home.bates.edu/?p=19547A pioneering choreographer, leading researchers in the fields of climate change and reproduction, a best-selling novelist and one of television’s best-known journalists will speak and receive honorary degrees during Bates College’s 144th commencement ceremony at 10 a.m. Sunday, May 30, on the college’s historic Quad, at Campus Avenue and College Street.

The event concludes the undergraduate careers of some 456 members of the Bates’ class of 2010, representing 33 states and 33 countries.

The 2010 Bates honorands are:

Rennie Harris, the choreographer who brought hip-hop to the mainstream world of dance

James McCarthy, a scientist recognized internationally for helping to communicate the science of climate change

Teresa Woodruff, a researcher responsible for pioneering work in the care of women who will become infertile due to cancer treatment

Dancer-choreographer Harris has taken hip-hop dance from inner-city streets to a mainstream audience. In so doing he has transformed both art form and audience, and has proven his own belief that hip-hop has the power to transcend boundaries of race, religion, gender and economic status.

With his company, Rennie Harris Puremovement, this North Philadelphia native has been a pioneer in choreographing, teaching and expanding the scope of hip-hop. The troupe is internationally known for such works as the autobiographical Prince ScareKrow’s Road to the Emerald City; the spiritually driven Facing Mekka; and the critically acclaimed Rome and Jewels, a hip-hop opera that transports Romeo and Juliet into the world of rival B-boys and street gangs. (Harris previewed the work at the Bates Dance Festival in 1999.)

Harris began his performing career in the 1980s with the Scanner Boys, a group that he helped found, and in the mid-1980s he toured internationally with the Fresh Festival, the first hip-hop tour. He founded Rennie Harris Puremovement in 1992, and the company gained national visibility in 1995 through performances with Dance Africa America.

Honors that Harris has received in recent years include, in 2007, one of 50 United States Artists Fellowships and the Artist of the Year Award from the governor of Pennsylvania. Harris has also created works for The Philadelphia Dance Company (Philadanco), the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. He has been likened to such choreographers as Ailey and Bob Fosse, and was described by The Philadelphia Inquirer as “Philadelphia’s greatest cultural export.”

McCarthy, a Harvard professor of biological oceanography, is recognized internationally for helping to communicate the science of climate change. In a 2008 profile describing his work, The Boston Globe said that McCarthy’s extensive, Arctic-to-Antarctic research experience made him a “first-person witness to the moment when a dangerous hypothetical became reality, and a gatherer of important evidence to support the theory that humanity is having a drastic impact on the Earth’s climate.”

A passionate public intellectual within the global climate discussion, McCarthy led the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability working group for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001. After the Nobel Peace Prize went to the IPCC in 2007, McCarthy said the prize acknowledges that “if we really internalize and act on this statement about climate change, the world will be a more peaceful place.”

McCarthy is Harvard’s Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography and he has led many national and international committees and research programs relating to ocean and climate science. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 2008-09 served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

McCarthy researches the regulation of sea plankton productivity, focusing on regions around the world affected by seasonal and inter-annual climate variation. He received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Gonzaga University and a doctorate from Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Veteran journalist and television anchor Pauley is known for her 13-year tenure as co-host of NBC’s Today show and for 12 years as co-host of Dateline NBC. One of the most influential members of a pioneering generation of female broadcasters, Pauley became the first woman to anchor the evening news in Chicago and a year later, in 1976, was named co-host of Today. She was 25.

During nearly three decades at NBC, Pauley covered events that have defined our time, from the fall of the Iron Curtain to the attacks of Sept. 11. At NBC, Pauley also anchored evening newscasts and hosted a weekly newsmagazine, Real Life with Jane Pauley, and MSNBC’s retrospective news program Time and Again.

Pauley has been honored with numerous awards including multiple Emmys, the Radio-Television News Directors Association’s prestigious Paul White Award and the Gracie Allen Award for outstanding achievement from American Women in Radio and Television.

She is widely admired for her openness about her personal struggle with bipolar disorder in the early 2000s, which she wrote about in the memoir Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue (Random House, 2004). In September 2009, she lent her name to the Jane Pauley Community Health Center in her home state of Indiana. Serving local residents regardless of insurance or income, the center emphasizes the integration of medical, dental and behavioral health.

Pauley received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Indiana University in 1972. A resident of New York City, she is married to Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Strout, a member of the Bates class of 1977, understood even as a child that writing would loom unusually large in her life. At home, writing “was just in the air,” Strout explained in an August 2009 Washington Post article, and her mother urged her to write down what she saw.

From this early introduction to the literary life, Strout has developed a career distinguished by three full-length fiction works (all published by Random House) nationally acclaimed for their power to conjure up captivating characters with complex emotional lives. 1998’s Amy and Isabelle won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and a Los Angeles Times award for a fiction debut, and was made into a movie for ABC television in 2001. Abide with Me (2006), the story of a small-town clergyman’s fall and redemption, was a national best seller and Book Sense pick. Olive Kitteridge, a “novel-in-stories,” won the 2009 Pulitzer for fiction and became a New York Times Best Seller.

All these works are set in Maine. Strout was born in Portland and spent much of her youth in Maine, a state that means “just about everything” to her, as she told Bates Magazine in 2006. Majoring in English at Bates, Strout earned her first fiction byline in 1982 and since then has published short stories in The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine and various literary journals.

While paying her dues as a writer, Strout worked a variety of jobs including waitress, mattress salesperson and nightclub pianist. She holds a law degree from Syracuse University and teaches in a low-residency writing program at Queens University, Charlotte, N.C. She lives in New York City.

Woodruff is an obstetrics and gynecology researcher who coined a new word, “oncofertility,” to describe her groundbreaking work creating clinical care options for women who will lose their fertility due to cancer treatment. As co-editor of the first book on this topic, Oncofertility (Springer, 2007), she describes the field’s interdisciplinary technology and procedures — but also, importantly, collects and shares human stories.

The approach reflects Woodruff’s focus on the human condition in the context of research. “We’re trying to create a total shift in how we interact with female cancer patients to anticipate their lives as survivors and their ability to bear children,” she says of her work.

Woodruff is a Thomas J. Watkins Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine as well as professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She is chief of the newly created Division of Fertility Preservation and founder and director of the Institute for Women’s Health Research, and she helped to create and now runs the nation’s first Oncofertility Consortium, a National Institutes of Health-funded initiative that represents medical innovators from the oncology and fertility fields.

Her awards include the Endocrine Society’s Richard E. Weitzman Memorial Award for exceptionally promising young investigators, and she is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Woodruff, who earned a doctorate in biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology from Northwestern, has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and 40 editorials and book chapters.